CNEX, a Nonprofit, Helps Filmmakers Document China

Sandi Dubowski, center, director of the 2001 documentary “Trembling Before G-d,” and Violet Feng of CNEX speaking with filmmakers in Beijing.

Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

By ANDREW JACOBS

August 20, 2013

BEIJING — If you think documentary filmmaking in the United States is a vocation for masochists with empty bank accounts, consider the challenges Chinese directors face: detention, beatings and censorship. Directors willing to play by the government’s strict rules can see their films screened on Chinese television or at a small number of officially sanctioned “independent” film festivals. Others can walk away with generous state support.

Then there are those trying to carve out a middle ground between the well-financed collaborationists and the embattled nonconformists. On any given day, a determined band of film promoters and producers, many of them volunteers, can be found at a former cotton warehouse on the outskirts of Beijing, where they help raise money for young filmmakers, guide neophytes through rough-cut edits and organize low-profile screenings on college campuses around the country.

The enterprise, run by the nonprofit CNEX, short for “China Next,” was started by three Taiwanese film devotees who seem to have found a way to navigate the politically hazardous shoals of China’s cultural landscape. In the eight years since they set up shop on the mainland, their organization has financed dozens of documentaries, including subjects like poor mink farmers coping with the suicide of their only child; the pressures young students face preparing for China’s make-or-break college entrance exam; and the lives of transvestites living in the southern boom city of Shenzhen.

The foundation, which is registered in Hong Kong and runs an influential film festival in Taiwan, has well-placed friends in the Communist Party’s cultural apparatus who have helped insulate it from undue interference. But, perhaps just as important, CNEX’s films avoid third-rail themes like the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown or the repression of Tibetans and of Falun Gong, the quasi-religious movement the Chinese government considers a dangerous cult.

Ben Tsiang, the chief executive of CNEX, said that still leaves a sizable gray zone of socially relevant topics, even if most of the films have little hope of being screened domestically. “We all know where the red lines are,” he said, “but there are lots of yellow lines, and we know how to handle those, if they are done so tactfully.”

Mr. Tsiang knows how to waltz with the government apparatchiks. He is a founder of Sina, China’s leading Internet portal and the company behind Weibo, China’s Twitter-like behemoth whose in-house censors are trained to remove content that might anger the central government.

After a decade of grueling 18-hour days that ended in open-heart surgery, Mr. Tsiang cashed in his Sina stock and decided to answer a long-buried calling. His idea was to make a sweeping documentary about China: the garish wealth of the nouveau riche, the bitter lives of migrant workers left behind by the boom and what he calls the country’s “values disorder.”

In the end, he decided that one film couldn’t capture the moment. “I thought, ‘We should create a film industry that documents what is happening in China,’ ” said Mr. Tsiang, 44, a graduate of Stanford University who was born in California and partly educated in Taiwan.

CNEX aims to create 100 films over 10 years. The idea, said Ruby Chen, another of the founders, is to produce a body of work that will document a wrenching period in Chinese history. “We want to leave something behind for the next generation,” said Ms. Chen, 55, a former consultant for McKinsey & Company. (Her husband, Hsiao-ming Hsu, is a prominent Taiwanese film director.) Many CNEX-sponsored films have been critically successful, at least outside the country. Four years ago, Du Haibin’s “1428,” about the aftermath of the devastating Sichuan earthquake of 2008, won the prize for best documentary at the Venice Film Festival. The film has never been screened in Chinese theaters, but CNEX has made it available as a free download, with 3.7 million views so far.

Each year, the foundation’s advisory board sorts through as many as 130 submissions that are loosely tethered to abstract ideas it mandates, like “money,” “dreams and hopes,” “crisis and opportunity.” This year’s theme is “security and trust.”

This month a dozen finalists gathered in Beijing to pitch their projects; the seven directors who are chosen can expect help honing their treatments, making trailers and submitting their finished films to international festivals. They will also receive from $10,000 to $32,000 to complete their projects, grants that entitle CNEX to some of the rights for each finished film.

Wu Fang, a first-time director whose movie, “Love in Beijing,” follows young Chinese buffeted by the pressure to buy apartments they can’t afford, said the help has been invaluable. “As an independent filmmaker, you’re pretty much on your own out there,” he said in a phone interview.

The project has attracted growing support from donors domestic and foreign, including the Sundance Institute, which recently dispatched seasoned documentary filmmakers to Beijing to consult with last year’s CNEX finalists.

For some directors, however, finding support is the least of their worries. Wang Jiuliang, who received help from CNEX, endured three beatings while trying to record the human and environmental toll of the plastic waste that China imports, and Du Bin, who has worked as a freelance photographer for The New York Times, was detained for five weeks this summer after he released a documentary about a women’s labor camp.

Last month the veteran director Zhu Rikun became embroiled in an all-night standoff with security officials in Sichuan Province, who forced him to delete interviews he had just conducted with miners crippled by lung disease. “It’s bad enough dealing with government censorship and trying to earn a living, but Chinese directors also face the threat of arrest and violence,” he said.

The government has also gone after independent film festivals. In April, they forced the cancellation of the Yunnan Multicultural Visual Festival in southwest China, an important platform for emerging documentary filmmakers, and last August, the authorities literally pulled the plug on the Beijing Independent Film Festival by cutting the power on the opening day.

Despite such challenges, the increasing quantity and quality of Chinese documentaries are encouraging to even the most hardened cynics. Mr. Zhu, for one, recalls that back in 2000, he could count on two hands the number of independent filmmakers in China. Now, with the advent of inexpensive, hand-held digital video cameras, hundreds of young Chinese are making documentaries.

“The tougher the environment, the more material there is, and the more inspired I am,” said Yang Lina, a director whose documentaries delve into aging and familial dysfunction.

“The government has only just come to realize the power documentaries have to convey the realities of Chinese society,” Ms. Yang added, speaking by phone from a film festival in Japan. “And now it’s too late for them to do anything about it.”

Correction: August 21, 2013

An earlier version of the caption accompanying this article incorrectly identified the CNEX staff member pictured. She is Violet Feng.